Jeff Vogel Interview

Before delivering his GDC talk, Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel spoke with GeekWire about his career and what it’s like to be an indie developer. Considering that Vogel’s game-making career spans over two decades, the resulting interview covers a multitude of topics and is filled with neat little tidbits. We get some details about Spiderweb’s upcoming RPG that should be getting a Kickstarter campaign this summer, learn the reasoning behind the recent Avernum III remaster, reminisce about the shareware days, and so on. A few snippets:

Wilde: So the new game, the one you’re dealing with when you’re done with the iPad port — are you at a place where you can talk about that at all yet?

Vogel: I can give the basic outline I’ve given before. We tend to write one engine just because I’m so small. I have to do a lot of code reuse, so I tend to write one engine and then write a bunch of games in that engine.

I’m making a whole new engine, whole new art, whole new game system, whole new IP, new worlds, new characters. I hope to do a Kickstarter for it sometime in early summer.

I have a couple ideas for a name but we haven’t nailed down the complete name yet. I wish I could give more information about that. All of our games for the last 25 years or so that we’ve been in business have been the same sort of game, basically low-budget, turn-based, very story-heavy, very open-ended fantasy role-playing games. It’s kind of an evergreen genre. It’s a genre that there’s always going to be demand for and that’s something that I have a particular love for and skill with, so the new engine is going to be like that.

There are some people who hope that I’m going to just bust out with this crazy-ass 3D big-budget super fancy thing, but that’s not what I can do, both for lack of budget and lack of interest. And, frankly, lack of technical skill on my part. I’m not the best programmer in the world.

So you know, it’s going to be the same sort of thing we’ve always done and yet very, very different. We need to mix it up a lot every few years just to keep interest.

Wilde: OK, so brand-new everything, but still a single-player CRPG.

Vogel: Yep, it’s still single-player. Multiplayer is something we’ve been asked for again and again, but writing a multiplayer game is very difficult. It requires a lot of technical skill and it’s just, it’s not really something we’re interested in.

We’re a storytelling company. We just telling a single-player story like a novel with lots of fighting, that people can just sort of sit in their room alone and sink into.

[…]

Wilde: What got you started on the solo development route? Were you just a garage developer? You said you were born in 1970, so you were 24 when you started working on this?

Vogel: Yes. I was in grad school studying mathematics and I hated it.

Wilde: So in the grand tradition of grad students everywhere, you found something else to do.

Vogel: Pretty much. That’s how you escape grad school. It makes your life so intolerable that you are eventually forced to leave it and figure out what you actually want to do with your life.

My wife at the time had gotten a real job and our dreams came true. We were able to buy an actual computer, so we did that. She was hugely supportive of me and I said, you know, this is driving me crazy. I’ve always wanted to write a real, full-on, put-my-whole-back-into-it computer game. She said, “Great. You do that, and I’ll draw the art for you.” So that was what she did.

I wrote my first game, Exile: Escape From the Pit. During the day, I did my grad school stuff, and at night, I was 24 with unlimited energy. I didn’t need sleep, I didn’t need rest. I just threw myself fully into it and wrote my first game and released it as shareware, which was a thing that existed at the time. And God help me, people bought it.